The Ghost of a Mountain

Details

GED QUINN (B. 1963)
The Ghost of a Mountain
signed, titled and dated 'Ged Quinn 2005 The Ghost of a Mountain' (on the stretcher)
oil on linen
105 1/8 x 72in. (267 x 183cm.)
Painted in 2005

Provenance

Wilkinson Gallery, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2005.

Literature

Ged Quinn: My Happieness Gives Me a Right to Your Benevolence, exh. cat., London, Wilkinson Gallery, 2007-2008 (illustrated in colour, pp. 15-16).
E. Booth-Clibborn (ed.), Newspeak: British Art Now, exh. cat., London, Saatchi Gallery, 2010 (illustrated in colour, p. 233).
E. Booth-Clibborn (ed.), The History of the Saatchi Gallery, London 2011 (illustrated in colour, p. 813).

Exhibited

London, Wilkinson Gallery, Ged Quinn, 2005.
St. Petersberg, The State Hermitage Museum, Newspeak: British Art Now, 2009-2010 (illustrated in colour, p. 28).
London, Saatchi Gallery, Newspeak: British Art Now, Part I, 2010.
Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia, Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now, 2011, p. 190 (illustrated in colour, p. 191).

Special Notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. VAT rate of 20% is payable on hammer price and buyer's premium

Brought to you by

Matthew Rigg

mrigg@christies.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7389 2221

Lot Essay

A bank of firs, beautiful and threatening, towers in the twilight of Ged Quinn’s The Ghost of a Mountain, calling to mind the sublime landscapes of the German Romantic painters. Yet all is not as it seems: a lilliputan cottage rests on a miniature mountain on the forest floor, nestled within brambles, moss and tree stumps. It is none other than the now-destroyed Berghof, Hitler’s chalet in the Bavarian Alps, rendered in delicate miniature by Quinn. Its tiny walls are no longer white-washed: graffiti daubs them, naming in neon colours the supernatural entities from William Blake’s 1797 epic poem Vala, or The Four Zoas. Perched over a yawning chasm, the chalet becomes the centre of its own universe, sun and moon spinning around, their feeble light failing to dispel the darkness.
Quinn weaves art, literature, history and theology into a luxuriously dense web of horror and mystery. A constellation of references, drawn from across European history, real and imagined, is joined up into a work which addresses very much contemporary themes: the timeless nature of evil contrasted against the capacity of the human mind to neglect and forget.

The Ghost of a Mountain

Brought to you by

Lot Essay

More from Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction